3d ago

‘Hard and fast from every direction’: inside the group plotting Poilievre’s blitzkrieg of cuts

Attention Required! | Cloudflare

Over the past year, if you asked around Ottawa about the transition team that was planning Pierre Poilievre’s first days in government, you were likely to be met with shrugs. The members of the team were not named, and those in the know were not talking.

Such discipline, however, sometimes falters under the influence of a few drinks. That’s what Bryan Evans, a political science professor at Toronto Metropolitan University, found out in late 2024. Around the winter holidays, he ducked into his neighbourhood bar and ran into an old acquaintance. The man wasn’t himself on the transition team, but it turned out he was deeply informed. They slid onto stools for a conversation.

The group was preparing for a Poilievre government to hit the ground running. It was going to be a blitzkrieg.

“You were there at the start of the Mike Harris government.”

“Yeah,” Evans said.

“That’s going to be the playbook.”

It was an ominous sign.

15 comments

I'm so tired of Conservatives wanting to shred the social safety net that makes Canada such a great place to live. They're constantly trying to unilaterally reduce the quality of life of most of the country and yet they still form government without even trying.
Someone needs to run an advertising campaign that compares the year-over-year dollar amounts of the spending and cuts of various governments so we can dispel the myth of the party of fiscal responsibility. Especially when it comes to tax cuts - you can cut taxes for the lowest bracket and it still mostly benefits rich people. And then you get, what, maybe an extra $700 at tax time?
The Conservatives are stealing our country's prosperity.
- They are still doing it. Fuck it up, sell it off, privatize it. You think doug traitor ford has stopped ? They started fucking up schools 30 years ago, and are still working on it, just like the us. They aren't going to stop, they'll just keep lying about it. Conservatives, all of them, are traitors.
  
  Hi, can you point out where I said they stopped? Your comment confuses me because I overwhelmingly agree with you and yet it sounds like a criticism of my comment.

This is just one of the many reasons why we can't allow the Maple MAGAt into the PM's office.
- It might be good to know their names, and the names of their backers. If this goes sideways we should know whom to hold responsible.

Fuck PP Fuck the cons. Love to see them lose.

In other words, he's gonna follow the DOGE playbook. No surprise when he spent so much of last year ranting about cutting everything he can in the government. All public spending gone, and in its place will be the exploitation of raw resources.
PP is oil and minerals first, everything else a distant second.
- Mike Harris did it back in the 90's in Ontario and they still feel the repercussions of it.
  And PP is just like almost every other politician in Canada, seeing us as ONLY a resource nation that should be stripped bare. No thought is given to actually ramping up manufacturing and using our own resources to build our own machinery, chipsets, batteries, etc.
  Harris was a cunt, as is PP and Trump and Putin and Drug Fraud and almost every other world politician who's sold their soul to big money. None of them give a shit about people.
  
  Exactly. Canada isn't some third world country who's ability is capped at only selling the most basic of commodities at low prices.
  We're not only in the top 10% most educated, skilled, and industrialized nations of the world, but also our financial power means that it's impossible to compete solely on resource if third world competitors get their shit together.
  Hell, we're at the point that industrial production is only barely profitable due to the education level and power of our currency. Canada needs to keep pushing the upper side of profitable markets, which is the service industry, as we become less and less competitive in the raw commodities market year by year.
  Not to mention that there's a high chance that we've already hit peak oil, so that entire sector is going to dwindle over the next few decades. And even if it hasn't, all the pushes towards non-carbon based energy means that fewer and fewer sectors are reliant on oil every year, making peak an inevitability.

Pretty sure the current US administration used the hard and fast play and look how thats going. Shouldn't need any more proof than that to do the right thing this election and keep PP out of office.
- PP looks at the USA right now and thinks "Yep, that's what I want for Canada." Vote, and keep him away from power.

Cuts are so short sighted and end up making life worse for everyone. Targeted investments and sensible policies are where its at.
- They want to make life worse for everyone. That's their goal. They are evil.
  
  It’s the zero-sum mentality. Some people can’t feel like they’re winning unless somebody else is losing. The idea that we all work to be winners is completely lost. It’s a lifelong political frustration.

This is just vandalism.
How do we protect the welfare state from these vandals? It's like terrorism at this point, we need to be beating them every time but just need to win once to cause catastrophic damage.
Surely there is a way to moderate the capacity of any one government to massively undo the work of decades of building up.

15 comments